World Reviewer rating

Peles Castle

If for any reason you got lost in the Transylvanian forest of a windswept night and a castle appeared between the trees as if by magic, its doors creaking open to admit you to a grand hall in which, attended by no one, you would discover a sumptuous banquet, then Peles Castle may well fill its place in your imagination.

In reality, however, it's certainly not home to the un-dead but quite possibly to ghostly parties, meetings and official events attended by dignitaries, politicians, artists and royals who brought curios and precious objects as gifts to add to the glorious collection begun by King Carol I, who began building Peles in around 1875 after an entirely original, eclectic design by Johannes Schultz, rejecting innumerable part-copies of Europe's most celebrated buildings in the process. The result was – and is – a mixture of deliciously romantic German Gothic and Italian Renaissance features, and the interior is a tangle of elegant staircases, mirror-lined, gold-panelled halls, oak-panelled rooms swamped with ancient weaponry, paintings and taxidermy and show-chambers so stylised that they could have been borrowed straight from the Chateau de Versailles or a Turkish palace.

The castle's brave, romantic creator died and was buried here in 1914, leaving the place to successive generations of royals, but his statue still gazes across the formal gardens and above the ski town of Sinaia to the mountains.

It's closed on Mondays and for the whole of November each year; it's easier to go in Summer, but bad weather could hardly rob the place of its atmosphere.